ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages

Microsoft

Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part. 

 

These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.

 

Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.

 

Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.

 

SharePoint_ModernTeamSite-Home_MAIN.png

 

Let us know what you think,

Mark

207 Replies

I've been testing the new modern pages and I'm very excited for the potential.  However I'm disappointed that the amount of web parts in the toolbox is very limited at this time.  When this was demoed during the Future of SharePoint event, https://youtu.be/0NyxhMlIGeA?t=3454  , many awesome web parts where in the toolbox, but I don't have access to very many of those web parts now. 

 

Also in the blog post, it appeared I was going to be able to embed a Yammer group on my modern page easily, but I'm not seeing that option. 

 

How soon will the web part toolbox gain more web part choices? 

 

Below is an example of the web part choices I see in the toolbox.

modern page.jpg

Hi

 

I've also had a quick play with the modern pages and can see the potential of this being a great new feature. I have some initial feedback (Is there a specific site where I should be adding this?):

 

- Can't set the new page as the default homepage - error "Could not set this page as your homepage. Please try later". Have tried several times
- The width of the content seems to the fixed
- I can't select a specific content type for documents to display in a page

- Even though the I have set the option "Show this many items at a time" to 10 I only see 6 - maybe it needs more time to index. Also I would expect to see a paging option here

- As (I think) has already been mentioned I'd like to be able to add my own banner at the top of the page as well as being able to resize it as it takes up quite a bit of height

- General abaility to change the look and feel of items e.g. Quick Links, etc.

 

Overall I think this is a great new feature and the right direction for SharePoint so well done. I am looking forward to seeing further enhancements.

 

Thanks

In addition to the above Web Parts being limited, it is very hard to set the New Page on a Group Site unless you directly edit the URL to get to the SitePages Library as, clicking Site Contents always takes you back to the Documents Library. Also, if you add a new Library, it always takes you back to the Documents Library, it does not add the Library currently. Also, it does not seem to function within tradiational SharePoint Sites as yet as, when select ing to add a new page, its giving the old Page Canvas.

@Eric Davis - thanks for you inquiry. I really appreciate you mentioning this as yammer should be available to you now. I've opened a bug to track this and will reply when we have more info.

 

We have a pipeline of web parts that we're working on internally, and a number of third parties that are using our SharePoint Framework (in preview) to build solutions that you should have an option to install in the coming weeks/months.

 

I'd love to know what capabilities you'd like to use, beyond yammer (which you'll have shortly). Care to share a list?

After creating a new Site Collection, I have managed to use the Modern Pages. Created Page and have added 'Highlighted Content' WebPart Highlighted.PNG

 

 This is now showing documents from a completely different Site Collection even when Source is saying this Site. Site has been provisioned under \Sites Container so should not be exposing any data from other sites and, site that these doucments are retrieved from has a completely different Security Group.

Hi Azam, thanks for the feedback.

- We're investigating the 'set as homepage' error you're seeing. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
- The column width is fixed. We're working on different layout options within that width, and we'll also consider your feedback about the fixed nature of it.
- For setting a specific content type, do you mean within the Highlighted Contents web part?
- Good feedback on paging. Indexing latency does apply, but can you share how recently those items that you expect were created?
- Feedback heard on branding and theming. We'll be able to share more here in the future.
- Again, good feedback.

@Scott Mckenzie - Thanks for the report. We need a bit more information to better understand the issue. I sent you a message.

Hey, 

 

Still nothing on new groups for me, but I do have SharePoint Lists and Libraries experience turned to classic despite being first release. Could this be why?

 

Thanks.

Hi Dave

 

Thanks for responding.

 

Yes I am referring to the Hightlighted Contents web part. Very simply I can choose Documents, Pages, Videos, etc. But I cannot choose a specific content type, similar to a Content Search Web Part. For example I may only want to show Policies or Procedures.

 

I also checked the number of documents displayed and it is still at 6. So there seems to a limit even though you can enter more than 6 in the "Show this many items at a time" box. And yes the paging would be good, similar to the CSWP, in that X documents are displayed but a paging can be used to show more.

 

Thanks again. Like I said I think this is great especially as it is also responsive. Quite timely actually as I have a client who was looking for something like this but with a bit more branding. So I can tell them that it's coming soon.

 

Final point, I assume we can start using this create pages which may become production pages/sites in the coming weeks/months?

 

Thanks

Azam

Is branding really necessary? Unless the site, page, group etc is viewed by people outside of the company, isn't branding nothing more than a exercise in vanity on a company wide scale? Let me change the accent colour and I'm happy.

Only from what I understand, permissions for a Group's Site (Team Site) can be set independently from other aspects of the Group? The same is true for Files (Document Library)? There's of course every chance I've misunderstood!
The likelihood of it only being available to new tenants is slim to none. Everyone will get it.

IMO, it depends on your definition of branding.

 

As part of our "branding" in SharePoint online, we have an corporately defined enterprise navigation (mega) menu that is injected into the top of every page to allow users to easily navigate through our large SharePoint environment.

 

Enterprise navigation (across site collections) has always been woeful.  Personally, I hate having to send users into the big bucket search sites like Delve and SharePoint Home to find simple structured corporate materials. 

 

There are other little tweaks that are preferred that we can learn to live without, but what I dont understand is the broad stroke at taking away current branding options (like CustomActions) from the modern experience.  It is stated under the guise of protecting end users, but if you know what you are doing and MS takes the stance of "you break it you fix it", I dont see what the big deal is.

 

CustomActions worked in the Modern Experiences for a long time, even to the point that I was able to have a fully working branding/navigation that worked seamlessly across classic and modern experiences, before it was then taken away recently.  

 

The two biggest reasons our organization isnt jumping to the modern experiences are currently (1) the global/top navigation with publishing features are all screwy (see here) -being worked on- and (2) no firm way ahead for doing customization on a site collection / site scale (lost functionality/investments that has been recommended by ms for years).  

 

Yes branding is necessary. We run multiple companies from 1 parent Org out of our tenant, each has their own site collection, and branding is imperitave for us.

@Eric Davis - We turned on the flight to add the Yammer web part to modern pages. It will be rolling out over the next few days.

@Azam Javaid - We're wokring on continuous updates to Highlighted content. So I appreciate you taking the time to let us know what you'd like to use it for. One of the things at the top of the list is to allow limiting by document type. 

 

We debated the verbiage on that setting "Show this many items at a time" as it really should say "Show no more than this many items at a time". If there are only 6 documents that match the options selected, only six will show.

 

As for pagination, thanks for the suggestion. Our inital thought was to only "highlight" however many items you want to show on the page (e.g. 10), allowing you to tune the query to show only the most relevant items, and specifically NOT show the long tail of results.

 

So we're working on ways for you to more accurately tune qhat content you display, and how you display it, over showing more results.

 

We have pagination in the backlog of things to think about in the future...but would love to know your specific scenario.

 

Thanks!

@Leon Summerfield-Kehoe - Me too.  Site Collection is the big container.  It contains SP groups, and libraries\galleries for site collection wide assets (e.g. list templates etc.). If you want a column to be available everywhere in the site collection, then you create it in the top level site of the site collection. The top level site also contains the Site Collection admin settings.  A site collection admin is all powerful in the context of a site collection. I know this world very well.

 

We have groups disabled in our tenant and therefore planner.   We want to enable them but the architecture isn't mature enough to work in a large tenant. For example we have been blocked over things like the inability to manage the namespace of groups and planner.  I thought we were close, but one uses Azure AD to manage namespace and the other uses graph so we stuck again. As a result I will be late to the groups bandwagon. Where do they fit in to my world view? The old world view was akin to nesting dolls.  Put your sites in site collections, put your lists and libs in sites and put your content in lists and libs. Choose what is inherited and what is unique.  Use groups to manage permissions and try to organize things so you don't have to assign permissions at the item level, but you can if you really need to. 

 

Honestly I am a little anxious about all this.  I have been working some very simple records management artifacts (policies and content types) to promote in our organization. I want to promote the use Managed Metadata. One of SharePoints strengths was that departments could create structured solutions and automate processes. Is all that going away? What if I recommend using SharePoint Online as a repository for files that have a retention schedule that lasts a few years, am I going to live to regret it?   I hear nothing of these subjects, there are no improvements in the pipeline. I assure people that Microsoft has our back, that they won't pull the rug out from under us, but my confidence is waning.   

 

Can a guy get a little reassurance?

Are modern pages rolling out separately?  We're a first release tenant (for everyone) and we DO now see the modern home page for groups but don't see any way to create modern pages (within teamsites or groups).  We have the option to add lists, libraries and apps, but not pages.  Clicking the cog doesn't show an option to add a page either.  Also created a new site collection with teamsite under site admin but no ability to create modern pages there either.

 

Just curious if I'm missing something.

Customizing, including branding, is a way to build identity, culture and great user experiences. Microsoft is a technology company and is therefore not necessary the "master voice of great intranets". I believe it is not accidental that of the worlds 10 best Intranets of 2016, nominated by Norman Nielsen Group, 9 are customized and branded Sharepoint solutions. But the most important point right now would be: When Microsoft have offered ways to customize and brand sites in the past, they should also offer new ways to do it, more or less in the same moment as they introduce new features that otherwise breaks branding.